Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Yesterday we went to see Steven Arnold and told him our suggestions for his Monkey film project. He liked everything except the proposed ending—that the princess finds the holy man and becomes his disciple and remains in his cave high up in the mountains, while the demon takes on the form of the princess and returns to torment the wicked uncle. At this point, Steven became evasive and said he would shoot it “both ways,” adding that he always shoots several endings. The meeting gave both of us doubts, especially Don, who feels we shan’t be able to work with him because he will always end by doing what he wants. He is very graceful, silly-pretty, gentle, passive seeming, with his pale eyes and absurd little moustache—and it is obvious that he has a “whim of iron” and unlimited energy. He has already made up a thick pack of what he calls storyboards—cards on which every shot is described; and for each shot he has made a drawing, in his more than somewhat Beardsley style.

  The problem is, how can we gracefully back out of this project now, if we decide to do so?

  Last night we went to another talk about Vietnam by Tom Hayden. This one was supposed to analyze the Pentagon Papers but was actually rather vague and often repetitive. Jack told Don that last time, after we had left, a speech was made by a man who Jack and Jim decided must be an FBI provocateur. Jack said that when they told this afterwards to Jon Voight he was terrified.

  Tonight there is a final meeting to decide what should be done to spread information about Vietnam. We aren’t going. If there is anything we can do, we shall hear soon enough, and every meeting is more and more crowded. Last night, the place was bursting.

  August 26. Last night, as a birthday request, I asked for the alarm not to be turned on. Don agreed, on condition that he shall have his birthday request next time, which will be for both the shades to be left up at night, instead of one. When he woke, he said, “A morning without an alarm is like Dobbin without a belt.” I dreamt that we were rehearsing a new play of ours. The word “skinflint” came into the dialogue. Don objected that “no actor would call himself a skinflint.” So we took it out.

  In the night, the dogs from the house right across the Canyon barked for a long time. They haven’t done this in months. The owners must have gone away and left them.

  I weighed a hundred and forty-nine and three quarter pounds, this morning.

  Just before breakfast, Don shaved off his moustache, as a birthday gesture. He hates himself without it and says he is now sure he must always have one. I prefer him without it, because I hate to see his (or anybody else’s) mouth hidden. Don claims that the moustache hides the lines around his mouth. I love it, I mean his mouth, with or without lines. But I had to admit that his mouth looked funny for the first few hours because he was so terribly conscious of its bareness.

  He gave me a beautiful long scarlet velour bathrobe, which makes me look like a cardinal. And a new billfold, the same model as my old one, which is coming apart, but with the more practical feature that you can remove the money clip and carry it separately.

  A cable of birthday wishes from Richard. Calls from Larry Holt and Mary Herbold—and from Paul Anderson (Roddy’s friend) yesterday. Birthday letters from Joan Elan, Harry Heckford, Lee Prosser. Jennifer and Norton Simon have given me a very good quality leather shirt which looks terrible on me; I’m going to exchange it.

  Yesterday afternoon, Gavin came in to say goodbye. He left this morning. Mark wasn’t with him yesterday; Gavin told us, “He’s sleeping,” with a slightly ironic smile. We didn’t know what to say to him, and made a great deal of protest that this wasn’t really a parting, the South of France is so near, etc. Yeah, so is the Vedanta Center at Gretz. Gavin will stay in a hotel near Toulon and from there they’ll house hunt. And he will start work at once on The Apple Tree. The way he described it, it sounds corny and dreary beyond words, Galsworthy at his worst. But Gavin is obviously determined to make the best of it. Never have I heard louder whistling in the dark. He even told us with a perfectly straight face how the lover, twenty years later, finds the little unmarked grave of the Welsh girl who killed herself for love of him! We both felt so thankful that we missed out on this assignment.

  Driving to supper with Nellie Carroll and Miguel, yesterday evening, I told Don that I saw a story about the Animals which at the same time would make it clear that the Animals are also human beings. And I do, still, today. But the objection is, as always, that I feel it is a kind of sacrilege to write about the Animals at all, except privately.

  The supper was quite [brutal]209 because Nellie wanted to pressure Don into recommending Miguel and his lamps to Irving Blum and getting Irving to come and look at them. Don doesn’t really admire the lamps all that much and doesn’t want to do this and is furious with Nellie for the pressure. Although the supper was therefore for their benefit, not ours, Nellie had the gall to call Don and ask him to bring the beer—Mexican, because we were having Mexican food, from the Mexican delicatessen on Mississippi; it was tepid and cardboardish. Jack and Jim were there too. They had stayed on at the Vietnam meeting on the 24th and heard the discussion which followed Tom Hayden’s lecture. Some tactless oaf, meaning to be on the right side, had stood up and quoted a remark made by an enemy of Jane Fonda, “She’s the only dike we haven’t bombed.” Jane had said nothing and everybody had been deeply shocked, and then someone else had said, “That remark is not to be repeated.” Aside from this, there had been much gloomy foretelling of what will be done if Nixon is reelected and therefore becomes the president who presides over the second centenary celebrations. It was said that he proposes to issue stickers to be carried on the cars of all “real” Americans: presumably the rest of us will be refused gasoline. And there is great fear of a possible Agnew presidency to follow.210

  Well, that’s all for this volume of diary. Had intended making some remarks on being sixty-eight but can’t think of any right now.

  September 2, 1972–December 14, 1974

  September 2. Now I’m just one week into my sixty-ninth year. On my birthday I made a resolution; henceforward I’ll try to make three acts of recollection every day instead of two—I don’t know what else to call them, meditation is much too grand and even bead telling may not always be possible in the middle of the day, if I’m away from home and in the midst of doing something. The important thing is to recollect.1 I feel this more strongly as I get older and nearer to the great test; will “this thing” be true for me and with me when everything else fails, when I’m on my own and it is my only hope and support? Well, at least I am glad I’m thinking this way and doing something, however feeble, to get myself ready.

  I worry more and more about Don. How am I going to avoid involving him, if I get sick and die slowly and expensively, like poor Igor? I think of this every morning, nearly, when I wake up.

  But this doesn’t mean that I’m depressed. Most of the time I am very content. And I have been through another period of excellent health. Yesterday, one of those sorenesses in the muscles of the abdomen started up again, but it may not be anything much. Every day we either run down to the beach or I go to the gym and jog around the block.

  Have just finished Philip Roth’s The Breast. I only read it because the publisher sent me an advance copy and because it is short. It stirs up my worst prejudices. I find it “disgusting” because it is a heterosexual fantasy and because it is so Jewish in its boring gallows humor and its delight in misfortune. But why doesn’t Kafka make me feel the same?2 Because he’s Kafka and Roth is Roth. Even so, the Kafka thing isn’t really my thing and never has been. I don’t delight in him.

  Have also been reading Bob Craft’s Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship. Whenever Igor speaks, it is marvellously alive; everything to do with Igor and Vera and their world is fascinating. But Bob’s travel sketches are too painstakingly cute, and a classic demonstration of how not to use similes. The sun going down is likened, not to a sinking ship which suddenly dives and disappears, but specifically to the Titanic. Why the Titanic? And, a few lines
later, “a herd of buffalo oozes to the neck in the mud, like overweight bankers in Turkish baths.” Why bankers?3 But at least I never want to stop reading.

  September 9. Don will be away for the day. He left at eight to pick up his parents and take them to the airport for the beginning of their trip to Europe. They are miserable with worry, of course, and probably won’t have a single happy moment until they’re safe home again. I talked to them on the phone this morning, told Jess to disregard the “sights” and just look around at the people in the different places they visit. I don’t think he understood what I meant, and now it seems to me to have been one of my typically simplistic remarks. (Reading Wystan’s Epistle to a Godson, which I have just bought, makes me feel how stupid and platitudinous I usually am.)

  After the airport, Don will visit Beverly Baeressen in her mechanical lung.4 They decided to make a reading list and then each read the same book on it at the same time and later discuss it. The trouble is, poor Beverly has all the time in the world and Don nearly none. The books he and I decided on were: Under Western Eyes, Emma, Dangerous Acquaintances,5 Jacob’s Room—I can’t remember what else.

  After Beverly, Don will go down to Laguna Beach and see Jack Fontan and Ray Unger. He isn’t altogether looking forward to this because he knows Ray will fix an enormous meal and he wants to starve himself; his weight this morning was up to 141, which for him is gigantic. (I was 149 and ½, which for me is average.)

  No interesting letters this morning but a large nuisance mail. Am irritated by a letter from a Betsy Crockett who calls herself the Program Officer of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council and wants to arrange an appointment for me with Mr. Martyn Goff. He’s a publisher from London, I think,6 and Angus Wilson sicked him onto me. What makes me mad is that this Crockett, who has my address, calmly writes, “I could not locate your phone number.” My first instinct was to tear up her letter but I tell myself that’s just senile spite, so I’ll call her Monday instead and bitch her about her incompetence.

  For the record, I thoroughly dislike Mark Spitz, a gloomy pretentious self-satisfied Jewish drear, with unsexy legs. But let’s not say anything more about the Olympics. The massacre releases nothing but negative emotion—a plague on both. . . .7

  I was talking to Laura Huxley on the phone a few days ago. Every time I do this, I feel affection for her, yet we so seldom meet. I’m afraid Jinny [Pfeiffer] isn’t well at all. They had been up to British Columbia, to some ashram, and Laura said, “The air was so marvellous, and then we come back here to all this filth. I love that in the Book of the Dead, where it says ‘Oh, Nobly Born—.” If I am nobly born, why do I breathe this un-noble air?”

  Saw Swami last Wednesday (6th). I asked him if he had any desire to go back to India—four of the girls are leaving in November. He was absolutely positive: No! I am so glad he feels like this. So often, as people get old, they long for the Homeland—and, in Swami’s case, such a longing would mean that Maharaj’s presence here, and the shrine here, hadn’t been enough to sustain him. It would mean, to a certain extent, that the inner life had not paid.

  Don still hasn’t started to let his moustache grow again, as he threatened to. He is so beautiful without it—and so infinitely much more revealed. Why does he have to mask himself ? The irony of it is, most people simply haven’t noticed that he shaved it off; I am the only one who really minds and is frustrated by that silly superimposition of hair.

  September 17. Gavin sent us a postcard saying that the South of France is off—high-rise buildings everywhere and bumper-to-bumper traffic; it reminded him of Marina del Rey. So now they’re trying Rome!

  We saw Swami the day before yesterday. (I love the moment when Don and I bow down and touch his feet simultaneously and get blessed together.) Talking about Maharaj and Premananda, he said, “When you were with them, you were in another world.” This was at supper, just after we’d eaten. He was full of joy, in-drawn yet eager to talk, as he relived the experience. His words were vibrations. I thought, he talked to God and now he’s talking to us. He told us how Maharaj would call for his water pipe, take a puff and then “go away somewhere else.” Much later, he would exclaim with surprise that the pipe had gone out.

  This was recorded. One of the girls had switched on the tape recorder which has a mike hidden in a flower vase on the dining room table. But then Swami got onto the history of the centers in the U.S., telling which swamis had been sent to which centers and how some had flopped and how others had succeeded—which was on a lower plane, as they say, but funny and charming, like a veteran actor talking about show business.

  Before supper, while we were in his room, Swami told us that he can read very little now, because of his cataracts. I asked, “Don’t you miss it?” and Swami answered, with the sweetest significance, “I don’t miss anything.”

  Utter silence from Hunt in Texas, and from Sheinberg, and from London and New York about our play—except that Edgar Lansbury, after talking to Jim Bridges (who was in New York making arrangements for his Paper Chase film), did ask to see a copy. We have talked to Henry Hathaway about his project, Praying Mantis. He is a dear, a bit like King Vidor, but the film story (by Ben Hecht) seems to us old-fashioned and dreary-dirty. Tomorrow or the next day at latest, we must decide what to do about this.

  I run every day, either down to the beach or while I’m at the gym. My weight this morning was down to 148. Chiefly because we had a supper of stilton cheese and melon.

  Have kept up midday bead telling—except that it sometimes doesn’t get done until late in the afternoon—every day but one. The first thing is to establish this as a habit.

  September 23. It was reading the paragraph immediately above which reminded me, at about 3:30, that I hadn’t made my midday japam for today. That’s the way it still goes, most days. Certainly there is some part of my mind which mischievously distracts my attention around noon, so that I forget. Is it the same “part” (if one can use that expression) which reminds me, later? It does seem like a kind of game, played with mischief but without malice.

  What I keep working on is this thought, that I must keep reminding myself of my only refuge. And now, past sixty-eight, I have no difficulty in understanding how desperately important this is; even though I feel wonderfully healthy at present. Meditation on the shrine, or on Swami in his room, is becoming easier. When I imagine myself in either of these places, I feel courage and protection. (Also, with closed eyes, I feel a strange upward turning of and pressure on the eyeballs. I must try to remember to ask Swami about this.) Imagining myself in Swami’s room has an extra advantage, because I can think of Maharaj’s photograph over the mantelpiece at the same time, and remember that I am not only in Swami’s presence but also, through Swami, in Maharaj’s, because Swami is always in his presence. Sometimes, the sense of safety which this brings is quite strong. I feel that I would not be at all afraid to die, if I might be carried to Swami’s room to do it, or even put in front of the shrine. But I must never forget that this faith is a grace; I can’t command it and daren’t give myself the least credit for it, or I shall probably lose it. And there’s a tremendous added joy in the thought that my darling beloved Kitty isn’t excluded from any of this. I don’t have to bring him into Swami’s room, he sits there in his own right as Swami’s disciple, and I can picture him sitting across from me, also at Swami’s feet, as he so often does.

  Swami, when we saw him three days ago, didn’t seem as lively as he had been the week before. I think the heat tires him, and he is still waiting to hear if the doctor will agree to his having his cataracts removed. However, we had our first post-holiday Gospel reading in the temple and he answered questions.

  In the late afternoon of the 17th, we drove up to the top of Las Tunas Canyon, to visit Peter and Clytie Alexander, who are getting ready to build a house at the head of an adjoining canyon which winds down to give a glimpse of Malibu Colony on the shore. At present, the Alexanders and their children are living in a box-shaped
semitransparent tent and cooking out of doors on butane stoves and hibachis. (It seems that the Forestry Service hasn’t been after them yet about the possible fire danger; as for the danger of being swamped, they expect to have the house at least partially built before the rains come.) Larry Bell, Chuck Arn[o]ldi, with a pigtail, Guy Dill and some other art men accompanied by art girls were there, drinking saki and, a few of them, sniffing.8 (That at least isn’t a fire hazard!) Two of them were playing catch with baseball mitts—I can’t help it, it always embarrasses me to see grown men doing this in a social situation; it seems sheer macho showing off. . . . The place is still wildly beautiful and almost un-inhabited, though constantly overflown by planes and helicopters. We watched the sun set and the stars come out. It seemed incredible that we were only twenty minutes’ drive from Santa Monica. Talked mostly to Clytie. Don says he likes her better than any other woman he knows and I can understand why. We ought to visit her sometime when she’s alone. The children go to school in Topanga Canyon by bus and Peter spends a working day at a studio in Venice.

  Almost the only house visible from the Alexanders’ homesite is called Sandstone. It is a nudist colony; Peter describes it as a “fuck club” and says that the members have sex according to the latest techniques of group therapy, curing each other’s impotence and other hang-ups. Sometimes the whole school of them will sun themselves on a mound near the house. Peter then watches them through a telescope. (Today, on the beach, Don and I were discussing a possible film—Sandstone, as it really is and as it appears to the Alexanders and their friends, contrasted with the Alexanders as they really are and as they appear to the nudists.)

  We have sadly told Hathaway we don’t want to work on his story. I’m afraid he was terribly disappointed. Wrote him a note later, suggesting he might like to consider making a film out of Mr. Norris. No answer yet.